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Category: Nonviolence

Culture/Love/Nonviolence/Peace/Poetics/Politics/Religion/Spirituality

A prayer for recovery, courage, discovery, and getting lost

Posted on May 12, 2016 by stephen t berg / 14 Comments

In a world choking on technology, help me lift my head, walk outdoors,  and breathe through my heels. In a world crusted over by the religions of rote, let...

Christianity/Culture/Hope/Love/Mercy/Nonviolence/Peace/Spirituality

Mercy come call on my cynical heart—a New Year’s prayer

Posted on December 31, 2015 by stephen t berg / 10 Comments

…Pope Francis has called 2016 the year of mercy, perhaps the following can be one of the year’s prayers: Mercy, come call on my cynical heart. Doubt I can...

Anthropology/Christianity/Culture/Love/Mercy/Nonviolence/Religion/Violence

One small perspective on the Paris attacks, with no pictures

Posted on November 16, 2015 by stephen t berg / 9 Comments

We grieve for the families and friends of those murdered in Paris, we feel relief hearing from friends and family who are safe. Too, we are thrown into confusio...

Christianity/Culture/Love/Nonviolence/Politics/Religion/Violence

A Confession – Toward Elimination of Violence against Women

Posted on December 3, 2014 by stephen t berg / 12 Comments

From 25 November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, to 10 December, Human Rights Day, the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-...

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Over the coming months, I’ll be slowly retiring Grow Mercy. This Easter marks 20 years and some 1500 posts. (And here, a deep bow to you, for reading and/or responding.) I’ll not, however, be retiring the impulse behind Grow Mercy, but will be shifting, exploring, following a hybridized urge, and a genre to suit. For me, what these decades have increasingly revealed is how writing is a spiritual path. Now, for whatever time and energy remains for me, I’ll be tilting more toward The Ragged Psalmist, still inchoate, but the handle feels like it fits. I do hope you’ll subscribe.

Why — The Ragged Psalmist?

Because some stubborn ember, still warm, compels me to write some cobbled songs — praise and lament, cries and sighs — and sound them back to the sacred Mystery.

To throw a wrench into a world geared up for business; to resist the moneychangers in their corporate temples — because poetry is political, and light is its administrative wing.

Because old lies and old words screw us over and must be remade to tell the truth; because our glossary of mockery needs burial, and the lexicon that’s left needs anointing.

To strive to honour the life of a sparrow; attend the spell of a dead star — whose light we still see; to feel, down to the bone, the quantum foam, we all flail in.

To thicken compassion and thin out aggression; to oppose injustice and hate in a way that excludes no one, not even the hater.

To let failure, discouragement, suffering and perishing have their say, without any spoon of bromide; to let joy, delight, and beauty come as they may.

To penetrate darkness and delusion — and so discover all this love in us.

Because mindfulness and mercy need constant oxygen.

Because in the time that’s left I want to tattoo the implications of our “forgiving victim” on the body suit of my heart.

Because reality points to unity — and we must hurry to catch up.

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Stephen T Berg | 

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